Data for the Deluge – Interoperability for Networked Healthcare

Today we release the 2017 Clinician Network Management Market Trends Report. It provides an overview of realistic approaches and solutions to improve data interoperability across the industry. Leading solution vendors are assessed and rated on their capabilities to support this critical function as well as their product roadmap’s alignment to future market needs. This report suggests that a gap remains between industry needs for interoperable data and vendor products, in part because most are tied to an approach and a technology stack that is not easily adaptable to modern development and integration ideas.

Meanwhile, the value and uses of non-traditional data types continues to expand around the industry. While clinical and claims data aggregation is still a challenge for some provider organizations, most of the vendors in this report have turned a corner on this capability and are supplying useful aggregations. Provider organizations are increasingly interested in using different data types. Socioeconomic, genomic, consumer, environmental, and other kinds of data are contributing to a more complete picture of patients and panels.

The industry is also teeming with organizations – beyond hospitals and clinics – that are clamoring to make this data more valuable, if only they had access. Payers and providers are beginning to collaborate to solve the economic and logistical challenges both types of organizations are experiencing with information sharing. Solutions hosted by convening organizations will allow health plans and HCOs to better leverage their data for common, shared applications.

We talk to providers and HIT vendors all the time that describe their approach to development in similar terms, across a multitude of use cases and applications. The first step is to source, ingest, and aggregate data to produce a longitudinal patient record that satisfies the requirements of their application. This process is all too often repeated on an application-by-application basis.

Instead, the technical approach advocated in this report involves leaving health data closer to where it was created and making it available to a range of diverse organizations, applications, and users via APIs. Developers could leverage data provisioning services to build a kind of on demand data infrastructure. This approach, widespread outside healthcare, represents a more effective way to source, supply, and consume data. It also offers a better way to accomplish development and integration goals. Such an approach will better support value-based healthcare and simplify what has evolved into complex and costly implementation and maintenance efforts.

This new report describes the approach and the state of the market in more detail. It also lays out some of the things that providers can do to begin developing API programs. We will also conduct a webinar on Tuesday, March 28th at 1:00 PM which you can register for here. The vendors profiled in this report are deeply committed to making healthcare data more broadly available and easily used around the healthcare system. The report is available to subscribers of the Chilmark Advisory Service or may be purchased separately. For more information, visit the report sales page here.